It looked at first like a flashback to last year’s Olivier awards for director Rebecca Frecknall at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Sunday night. Her revival of Cabaret won seven awards in 2022 and her new production, A Streetcar Named Desire, took home some of the biggest accolades this time: best revival, best actor for Paul Mescal (perhaps an inevitability given his ascendancy and Oscar nomination) and best supporting actress for Anjana Vasan.
But it became instead an overwhelming victory for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of the Japanese animated film My Neighbour Totoro. The show, directed by Phelim McDermott, is a spellbinding combination of Studio Ghibli-inspired aesthetics and Shinto-inspired philosophy alongside gorgeous light, sound and Basil Twist’s puppetry direction. It boasts a thoroughly diverse cast, too, and is an exemplar of the way animation can be reformulated for the stage. It was particularly satisfying to see the brilliant young lighting designer Jessica Hung Han Yun recognised for her talent alongside sound designer Tony Gayle.
